The Best Political Thrillers To Watch Right Now

Real-life politics are pretty damn frightening, so if you're looking for an escape from reality, maybe don't turn to the best political thrillers for entertainment. These movies play a different role, highlighting the high stakes of politics both real and imagined by screenwriters who sometimes end up being scarily ahead of their time. (Cough, Bong Joon-Ho's Snowpiercer, cough.)

These movies do this by taking a closer look at actual events, such as the Watergate scandal in All The President's Men. Let's just say political thrillers were all the rage in the '70s thanks to President Nixon as this list shows. More recently, it was Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty that was a deep dive into the hunt for Osama bin Laden that may not be entirely accurate. A reminder that these movies are narrative features, not documentaries so don't take them as fact, but rather as a jumping-off point.

This list of the best political thrillers is full of do-gooder journalists, conspiracy theories, and Meryl Streep as both hero and villain.